[19][20] In 2001, having taught himself how to computer animate, Ezawa made his first digitally drawn and animated video, Home Video, which features a fixed exterior view of a suburban house -- based on an image the artist found in a Bay Area real estate brochure -- above which, the clouds pass, the sky changes from day to night, and interior lights are switched on and off by unseen occupants.
But for me stylization is mostly a way to engage the viewer emotionally.” [25] Simpson Verdict demonstrates Ezawa’s process of abstracting a representational source image by rendering it in his distinctive style of drawing in which he flattens compositions and uses unmodulated colors that are reminiscent of color field painting, as well as the Superflat aesthetic in Japanese art and animation which tends towards “two-dimensionality” – an influence cited by the artist.
[27] Simpson Verdict first revealed Ezawa’s interest in “translating” culturally charged depictions by manually recreating them and presenting them in forms different from the format of the original source.
[30][31] Exhibited in New York at Murray Guy Gallery in 2005, art critic Martha Schwendener writes of Ezawa’s visual style and this installation, “There’s something comical about all this: the flat colors; the moving, animated eyes and mouths; the range of accents; the overlapping of voices which suggests the chatter at an extra discourse-y cocktail party.…With Ezawa, however, the voices and images remain the same as in the originals; only the format has been altered, reminding us that culture is just as reliant on proper packaging as any other arena in life…”[32] The History of Photography Remix (2004–2006) Presented in an exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum was Ezawa’s artwork, The History of Photography Remix (2004–2006) the artist’s version of the history of photography in the form of a slide show comprising redrawn iconic photographs from a vast array of sources.
To create his video, LYAM (2008), Ezawa applied his process of visual translation to Alain Resnais’s influential 1961 film, Last Year in Marienbad.
The artist’s two-minute video depicts “NFL football players taking a knee during ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ Protesting police violence against unarmed Black men, the practice was started in 2016 by San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick.”[40] To make National Anthem, Ezawa repurposed footage of multiple teams with some close-up shots of players kneeling, “using it as the basis for meticulous, small-scale watercolor paintings.”[40] These watercolors, totaling over 200 images, some rendered more than once, became the frames of the animation.
As Melissa Smith notes in a New York Times review, similar to the way Ezawa’s Simpson Verdict “recontextualizes that history”, National Anthem distills the images of the players’ gestures, “leaving us free to examine them anew.”[28][42] Speaking about his choice of subject matter in general, Ezawa has noted that he does not see his work as “a commentary on American culture.” He has stated, “As an immigrant who has lived in the United States for a long time, I view my surroundings as an observer with the perspective and distance that immigrants bring to the experience.
[43][44] Originally shown in a public art installation in New York’s Madison Square park, Ezawa made his video, City of Nature (2011) by weaving together seventy recreated clips “from popular feature-length films in which nature plays a significant role in the overarching narrative.”[45] The six-minute video work samples nature scenes, which the artist manually redrew is his own style, from more than 20 popular films including, ‘Brokeback Mountain’, ‘Days of Heaven’, ‘Deliverance’, ‘Der Berg Ruft’, ‘Fitzcarraldo’, ‘Late Spring’, ‘Lord of the Flies’, ‘Moby Dick’, ‘Swept Away’, and ‘Twin Peaks’.